salomon@silver.cs.umanitoba.ca (Daniel J. Salomon) wrote:
> C's philosopy seems to be, "When in doubt, permit it. It just might
> be correct." The freedom that this gives programmers to create new
> ways of solving problems may be one of the reasons that C remains so
> popular, despite the fact that it it unquestionably unsafe.

gmckee@cloudnine.com (Gary McKee) writes:
|> The reason C is popular with coders is that, generally, they never have to
|> maintain other people's code. I've never met anyone responsible for C
|> language code maintenance who speaks well of the C Language.

Have you ever taken a look at the code for the gcc compiler, the X
windows package, or LINUX. These are three huge C projects that have
passed from coder to coder and they are a mess. They are full of
comments like "I think this code is right," and "This code segment
disabled until someone figures out what it is for." Nevertheless these
projects are very widely used, and users appreciate the times that they
succeed more than they complain about the few times that they fail.
--
Daniel J. Salomon -- salomon@cs.UManitoba.CA
Dept. of Computer Science / University of Manitoba
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada R3T 2N2 / (204) 474-8687
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